Hacker News Reader

"VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own."

You can build business and infrastructure without VC involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.

I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don’t have and explicitly don’t want to have any VC involvement (or big company involvement, as it would mean the same thing).

I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.

look at the activitypub ecosystem then, where no one needs permission to become a participant, and vc's refuse to even acknowledge its existence.

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

the fediverse is in no way related to this web3/blockchain bullshit. It's actually more related to the original idea of web 3.0 as semantic web due to the usage of similar protocols e.g. json-ld.

I'd be interested in that list as well. All of the major / currently most popular ones seem to be in bed with a16z: https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto

You'll find that VCs, the shortlist of usual suspects, have their hands in almost all web3 projects.

And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.

Yea, but has little to do with OP’s point, which was VC attention -> (requires, and therefore proves) centralized entities. The reverse isn’t true, and nobody claimed it to be.

We should just euthanize everyone and blow up the planet if the only worthwhile reason for doing anything is for VCs to extract profit from it. People who think accumulating more wealth than they need at the expense of people who are starving is ok should be thrown into a volcano.

"Please don't fulminate." It's tedious and repetitive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what we don't need in that regard.

Telephone co-ops still exist, and have for a long time. They manage to stay small enough to never become tasty meals. Sea eagles fly right by. There are -many- kinds of co-ops.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federatio...]

> Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site.

I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract.

In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve that. You wouldn't need to run a site.

Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.

Layer 2 solutions, specially zk ones like StarkNet, solve the scaling issue

And gleefully introduce contradictory trust issues that no one asked for.

Apart from scale the bigger issue is incentives and the governance of ethereum. It has already forked itself once at the orders of the Leadership, so people are rightly worried about what will happen after it switches to PoS

> Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own.

Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance they can get?

Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work because it's all speculation at this point.

The dotcom boom was mostly fueled by rabid speculation. Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new investors money coming in.

When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory can innovate new business models and ways of coordination.

The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is astounding.

As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First there's no application, then store of value is an application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how their code is going to change the world, well, they stole that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and Twitter founders.

When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley:

"I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."

> the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool".

No, that's not correct. When you buy a share of a publicly traded company (or a private one, for that matter), you are literally buying a fraction of their cash on hand, a fraction of their business operations, a fraction of their trademarks, a fraction of their inventory, and so on. You own part of the company.

The difference with cryptocurrency is that people ditched the entire ownership of anything and replaced it with just a token. It's like if you took a company, hollowed out every single thing that made it valuable, and sold the shares as novelty stock.

Anyone suggesting that stocks are just fun tokens that people trade back and forth doesn't understand what stock actually means. I think this misconception is very popular in the cryptocurrency world because it justifies the existence of tokens and crypto coins that aren't actually backed by anything of value. If you're convinced that nothing matters and it's all just tokens anyway, you're more likely to be persuaded to invest in crypto tokens and shun the stock market.

No, you’re in fact the one whose incorrect. Buying a share of GOOG in no way gives you rights to their trademarks or other IP.

In fact you don’t even get voting rights, unlike traditional stock. GOOG is the one that’s been “hollowed out “.

Likewise, owning a share of GOOG in no way gives you access to their cash.

There is one and only one thing you can do with a share of GOOG - hope to sell it to someone else for more money.

On the flip side, owning ETH gives you a stake which actually does give you governance rights, either via your own validator or a staking pool. And it gives you access to many other ways to participate in the network such as DeFi.

> Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new investors money coming in.

This is just nonsense. The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful. Buying back shares is more tax efficient for shareholders. Google spent $30 billion on share buybacks in 2020, and authorized $50 billion for share buybacks in 2021. You don't have to trick a "greater fool" into buying your GOOG shares, Google will happily buy them from you with their giant free cash flow. This is just how tax-efficient companies return money to shareholders these days.

> The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful.

I actually agree with you here. The thing is, the fact that Bitcoin or Ethereum doesn't have "intrinsic value" is not important or meaningful either. Obviously GOOG is valuable and obviously BTC is valuable, and obviously ETH is valuable, but in both cases you can play semantic games to toss around economic terms like "greater fool theory", without understanding where the fundamental value actually emerges from, to pretend like they're worthless.

If you actually follow the activity around Bitcoin and Ethereum, the idea that these coins are suddenly going to drop to $0 and nobody will want one is about as absurd as that happening to GOOG.

The advantage with decentralized services is that they scale and distribute costs.

If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid with VC money or you're going out of business.

If you can more easily build it on top of something like BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you need is a payment system so your creators can get paid.

The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself being a centralized service.

Not remotely similar at all. Right now if you don't like Facebook, there's nothing you can do to change it... but hypothetically if Facebook ran its infrastructure on a decentralized platform like Ethereum, then anyone could trivially fork the entire system with backwards integration.

It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and available for anyone to access.

That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.

Remember when the Ethereum "community" decided to roll back millions of dollars of transactions? All of these decentralised services are under the total control of a small number of powerful people. It's a myth.

> "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure

Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.

I’m personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz as they go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app